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05 August 2010 by nathaniel

North Brooklyn Public Art Coalition commission

In my inbox:

I’m writing from the North Brooklyn Public Art Coalition in regards to our latest project, nbAUDIO 2011.  NbPac is currently holding an Open Call for Brooklyn-based sound artists.  We are inviting artists to propose an original sound installation that addresses the historical, social, and political atmosphere of North Brooklyn’s community. Additionally, we are asking the artists to identify a site in Williambsurg, Greenpoint or Bushwick, in which the piece would be installed.  Attached is more information about the open call, as well as a proposal form – the deadline for applications is Monday, August 30th and the selected artist will be notified on September 15th.

Taking place this spring, nbAUDIO 2011 will be the fourth project presented by the North Brooklyn Public Art Coalition since we formed in 2009.  Past projects include last summer’s kickoff with the India Street Mural Project when six local artists were chosen by an RFP process to create a series of site specific murals on India Street between West Street and the East River, celebrating Greenpoint’s rich history and the arts of North Brooklyn.  In December, we presented one of the largest site-specific public art installations ever to take place in McCarren Park with Jason Krugman’s Living Objects – three LED-lit sculptures taking on a human form.  Then last June we unveiled Amanda Browder’s Future Phenomena, a large-scale, fabric sculpture created by the community and blanketed the façade of a Greenpoint building from June 19-20, 2010.

more: http://nbpac.wordpress.com/

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02 August 2010 by nathaniel

Mary Corrigall on Art and Capitalism

Just tweeted this, but the whole last two paragraphs are too good not to post. Granted, Corrigall is speaking mostly of the South African art scene, but it applies everywhere, I believe.

“The growth of the commercial sector of the art market since the advent of democracy has seen a power shift in which national and regional public art institutions no longer are the dictating authority on art. Given that many of these institutions were initially sluggish to transform in terms of widening the scope of their curatorial policies to include art and exhibitions of the work of previously marginalised artists, this actuality wasn’t necessarily a negative one – it has in some senses democratised art production, opening up discourses and allowing marginalised artists to enter the fray. Of course, the majority of these new galleries are white owned thus the power relations within this sector has remained skewed.

Because commercial galleries now hold the authority and under-funded public art institutions have become increasingly dependent on corporate funding, the brand of art that is displayed and celebrated is increasingly being determined by commercial factors or to meet the requirements of corporate sponsors. In other words art that might not be critically prized by academia, art producers or critics, is regularly given a pride of place in commercial galleries and other commercial settings such as at an art fair. This democratisation of the arts might have opened the once closed doors of the art world but it also means anyone with enough financial clout can dictate what kinds of art should be valued – often these individuals believe that their affinity for art automatically grants them insider knowledge of contemporary art practice. Thus the intellectual gulf between patrons and the arts intelligentsia is often quite vast.”

Read more.

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15 July 2010 by nathaniel

On Generosity and Making Art

I believe that artists no longer simply make images, they make discourse – they ask us not only to “look,” but to “look again,” to re-examine.

Art is always dialogical – I mean, simply, that it is in dialogue: with history, with other art and artists, with current events, with politics and pop culture and more. Most of all, it is in dialogue with people, with real people.

This is not the same as the en masse, people-powered internet – the democratic, vote yes or no, argue over at Wikipedia, digg this, intelligence of crowds we keep hearing about.

Because while I like LOLcats as much as the next guy, I’m interested in more depth.

I’m interested in people speaking to one another on a personal level, working together to create and change ideas, to make things, and to make things different.

I believe in the artist as public figure, as both engaging and engaged; because the only thing I appreciate as much as a beautiful and provocative work of art, is the discussion that can grow out of one.

Given that, I also believe that generosity is key to contemporary practices of art. If art is a conversation, you gotta make people want to talk to you; you gotta be nice, you gotta ask questions, you have to not only be interesting, but interested – in other work and what others say and do.

I believe in chit chat, in discourse, in studio critique, in humanity; I believe in art karma, in goin’ around and comin’ around, in sending folks to see things and meet people, and in sharing my tricks and my code and myself.

Teaching is a part of my practice, and a part of my work. Writing is a part of my practice and a part of my work. Collaborating is always implicit in what I do, and often explicit towards the end of a given piece.

I like to make and share and talk about stuff, and I like people who do said same.

I speak back to artists who came before, and converse with my peers about what we’re all trying to do. I hope others want to do the same, want to be in dialogue with what I do and make and say.

For me, generosity is essential to the contemporary practice of making art….

– slightly edited introduction to my artist talk, posted by request. the slide images I usually show are also fun, but in blog form (as opposed to live performance) they took away from, rather than added to, the text. comments welcome.

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12 July 2010 by nathaniel

compressionism site updated

compressionism.net

Just finished an overhaul of compressionism.net, and uploaded content, including works, press, documentaiton, etc. Look out for upcoming books and shows that feature the new work!

In this ongoing series of prints, I strap a desktop scanner, laptop and custom battery pack to my body, and perform images into existence. I might scan in straight, long lines across tables, tie the scanner around my neck and swing over flowers, do pogo-like gestures over bricks, or just follow the wind over water lilies in a pond.

Read more…

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30 June 2010 by nathaniel

New Media, New Modes: On “Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media”

My review of Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham’s book (both of CRUMB – the Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss), “Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media” (Leonardo books / The MIT Press) is the Rhizome News feature today. Teaser:

rethinkingcurating.jpg

Humorous and surprising, smart and provocative, Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media (MIT Press, 2010) jumps from opposing viewpoints to opposing personalities, from one arts trajectory to another. The entire book is a dialectic exercise: none of its problems or theories are solved or concluded, but are rather complicated through revelations around their origins, arguments and appropriations. Overall, the book adopts the collaborative style and hyperlinked approach of the media and practice it purports to rethink. In other words, it is not just the content of the book that asks us to rethink curating, but the reading itself; by the end, we are forced to digest and internalize the consistently problematized behaviors of the “media formerly known as new.”

Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham, co-editors of the CRUMB site and list (the Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss), have co-authored the book via email and on a Wiki, and assert outright that it is not a “theory book”; its structure instead “reflects the CRUMB approach to research, which discusses and analyzes the process of how things are done” (12). The sheer number of examples, citations, and first-person accounts in this nearly 350-page volume make it so that every time the trajectory coheres into a singular point or argument, it is then broken up again, into a constellation of ideas that make us rethink, again. We are issued challenge after challenge to our assumptions about media, our understandings of curatorial practice, and our opinions about the spaces in which we exhibit art. It is only after an exhaustive study of seemingly irreconcilable philosophies, practices and venues, the book implicitly argues, that we can begin to engage with what needs to be rethought, and how to do so.

Rethinking Curating makes three basic arguments. First, that one must approach a broad set of histories in trying to understand any given artwork, and “for new media art this set includes technological histories, which are essentially interdisciplinary and patchily documented” (283). Second, that such broad histories have led to the unique development of “critical vocabularies for the fluid and overlapping characteristics of new media art” (283). Cook and Graham reason that new media are best understood not as materials but as “behaviors” – participatory, performative or generative, for example. And third, that these behaviors demand a rethinking of curating, new modes of “looking at the production, exhibition, interpretation, and wider dissemination (including collection and conservation) of new media art” (1).

Read the whole article

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02 June 2010 by nathaniel

Screening Screens

I penned a book review for Rhizome.org, and another is coming soon. Teaser:

screens.jpg
Cover of Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art by Kate Mondloch

Kate Mondloch’s first book, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art, is a welcome study of the cathode ray tubes, liquid crystal and plasma displays, and film, video and data projections that “pervade contemporary life” (xi). The author reminds us that screens are not just “illusionist windows” into other spaces or worlds, but also “physical, material entities [that] beckon, provoke, separate, and seduce” (xii). Most importantly, however, Mondloch’s approach is that of an art historian. She does not merely use art as a case study for media theory, but rather makes the contributions of artists her central focus in this, the first in-depth study of the space between bodies and screens in contemporary art.

Like Nicolas Bourriaud in his Relational Aesthetics, Mondloch begins in the gallery space, and is interested in creating a “discrete critical framework” (63) for a specific genre: what she calls “screen-reliant” art. Mondloch recognizes the import of “viewing subjects” engaging with “actual art objects” (xii – xiii) and attempts to apply a combination of post-structural theory and phenomenology to her study. Here she describes the relationships between virtual and actual, sign and material, involving the theories and philosophies of Lacan and Deleuze on the mirror stage and cinema, for example, but always including the screen’s inherent materiality in how art is experienced.

Chapter 1, “Interface Matters,” describes in detail Mondloch’s category of screen-reliant installation art, looking to the work of Paul Sharits and Michael Snow as examples of how artists of the 1960s were, for the first time, investigating the interface of the screen itself: “the multifarious physical and conceptual points at which the observing subject meets the media object” (2). Here she goes to great lengths to remember the differences between screenings of film, and screens in film and video installation. The latter are hybridized as spatial and temporal, akin to Minimalism in their approach to the body, but with the potential for entwined and confused narratives as the timeline of its materials unfold. Mondloch’s reading of Snow’s Two Sides to Every Story is especially poignant.

Read more…

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